Google Home review: Second place ain't bad, but Google Home can't topple Alexa (yet)

Amazon's Echo is the undisputed king of the nascent smart home market -- a tabletop speaker with a disembodied online "smart assistant" named Alexa, available at your beck and call to answer your questions, tell you a joke or control dozens of compatible networked products in your house. But with the release of the Google Home, Google's own voice-controlled smart speaker, the Echo is finally getting some serious competition. Google, of course, already knows as much or more about you than Facebook, thanks to your web history, your Gmail metadata and tracking the GPS records on your phone. And now the tech giant is aiming to use that data to out-Alexa Amazon, making the little countertop speaker a friendly face for its search-engine-powered online brain. Google Home pulls info from your Google account to keep you informed about your calendar appointments, and the traffic on your commute.